2008-08-10 - 5:22 p.m.
As an immigrant to the United States, there is a perspective on government that I have been imbued with that cannot be undone. For as much as the sanity and sanctity of fair and just government of people is to be applauded here in the U.S., the memory that lingers and festers in the back of the mind is that of having it taken away. Taken away by people in unfathomable positions, enjoying fairy tales about their powers and secrets that we cannot know. Why does that thought always linger there for me, whereas I look around me (most of the time) and the others do not share this fear? It is because the memory of having justice and fairness taken away from me is still fresh in my mind. The memory of happiness and family and a government fair to its people, having been ripped asunder and murdered in the streets is still there. In its place, just as with the vestibule where the memory that festers, the degeneration of humanity and the degradation of happiness shines with unholy pride.
For those around me who seem to not care or have no such fears, I harbor no ill will or blame. It has been over 200 years since they fought the war that gave them the freedoms they enjoy. That fear of tyrannical overlords in their own high offices does not really mean anything because they have not experienced it in their lifetimes, or personalized the repercussions. That fear is for places where they "refuse" to accept our form of government. We are safe. We have been given oversight of our government. We have safeguards in place that protect us from a runaway powerful person. We can take their power away because we gave them that power with our votes. We are their bosses. We pay their wages. We are in control. Sure we are.
There are plenty of such despots around the world and plenty of wars and battles and inhumanities are being conducted every second somewhere. Somewhere ELSE. Not HERE. People have chosen not to personalize such problems of those "other" people. They have turned it into pictures on electronic screens. Meaningless people who they do not call "friend". Any single death, from a refugee camp in the deserts of eastern Chad to the bombed out apartment complex in Issetia, Georgia and everywhere in between, is virtually the same. It has become meaningless. It has become the same as a guy getting blown up in an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie. It is somewhere else. It is not real because it is not in front of the eyes. He was really just some electrons on a screen. He was not your neighbor. He would not have invited you in for a cup of coffee and a pleasant conversation and a good laugh over a nice joke. That person does not really exist.
The complacency that comes with comfort and appeasement is a very dangerous lounge to get adjusted to. A certain vigilance is always required to maintain the peace and order so hard fought to win. Memory is a fickle thing and history, as a form of progressively transferred medium of information, is higly-manipulable. Time and focus must be devoted to making sure our "histoires" (stories/histories) are not readjusted while we are paying attention to the rest of our lives and seeking entertainment, of which there seems to be no lack.
Above all else, we must know ourselves, personally. Get to really delve into the fears and joys, our passions and desires, and the many influences that drive our compulsions. In doing this, we can then extrapolate those feelings and motivations upon the others around us. As much as we would like to think of "others" as something really OTHER than ourselves, they are not. We are all human beings. We all share the same motivations and drives and compulsions. In knowing ourselves, we can know others. And in every single one of us, there is always a bit of good, and there is always a bit of mischievous evil. Knowing there is that little bit of evil, we must fortify our vigilance to maintaining the pillars that preserve the order that we enjoy. The civility that we have crafted from our human ingenuity.
I am proud to call myself a peace-nik. To do otherwise would be to negate the true meaning of being called a civilized human being. To look at the world, indeed everything in creation, from the ten thousand miles of dirt beneath my feet, to the hundreds of miles of air above me, to the billions of lightyears of the vacuum of space, to the fiery entrails of the sun, and to the maelstrom of matter that makes up the stars that are really and truly out there in space, and to see that an incredibly miniscule part of all that, here on the tiny and thin surface of this planet, is deemed "life", we would understand the fragility, and the splendor, and the utter incalculability of its value. Without life, the universe would be dead. And we would not exist to comprehend that piece of information.
In knowing all of this, and grasping the essence of possible non-existence, it is not difficult to imagine that body we see on that screen, to be that of someone we love. That dead body was once a person just like me. Just like the love of my life. Just like my friend. Someone I would defend with every effort of my being.
There are so many of us. There is such a growing strain on every one of us to provide sustenance to survive. There is so much urgency to grow, to consume, to compete, to procreate and to outdo "others" that we forget the notions of love and friendship and camaraderie and community. We revert to our animalistic manners of "others" having different shapes, sounds, colors, smells, customs and mentalities, and we presume that their intentions being so much like our own, that they must be after the same thing we are...to conquer and survive, at our expense. To survive, we must prevail. Their loss is our game. There is no way to be mutually beneficial. We cannot risk communicating with them about it. They might just win.
Recently, I was reminded that we are living in a time of war, ourselves. The people of the United States are in the lands of the people of Iraq and of Afghanistan. We have weapons there. We are dying. They are dying. From the beginning of our escapade to those lands, there were people opposed to going there. There were people highly in favor of going there. Ideologies of war and peace, life and death, preservation and reformation were screaming across headlines. Presumptions were made about our reasons to go there. Very real motivations were still fresh in our memories, of our brethren dying, of our foundations shaking, of our infrastructure weakening. The harpstrings of our emotions were played by every motivated character with access to a medium of information dissemination. We were angry, confused, shaken and rigid with anxiety. We shared a clarity of mind, only to miss that the clarity came with a highly narrowed focus of perspective.
Our soldiers are just human beings. They do not know everything. They are trained for certain tasks. They must carry out those tasks with certainty of their success, their utility and their consequences. They must trust that their bosses and their bosses' bosses, and ultimately their most powerful boss, the U.S. citizenry, has the foresight and the knowledge to make the right decisions about what is being done and where they are headed, and why. The soldier's job cannot be done with uncertainty, else it will not succeed, and the soldier would not be truly functional in their duty. It would be a blow to the soldier's self-image and meaning. They must trust that what they are doing is just and moral and dutiful and will actualize an end that justifies their hard work.
With that being said, that we need soldiers among us as civilized human being, means that we have not embraced our humanity, and we are still operating with animalistic thoughts and savage, beastly and guttural reactions. We have not transcended to realizing the mind. We have not evolved to understanding the part of us that makes us unique in the universe.
There are people in the United States who have the state of vigilance necessary to stay alert to the changes I mentioned before. The changes that are undertaken to change us as a people and as a head of government. The changes that slowly chip at the pillars and foundations of our constitutions, and our stability. Although vigilant, these people are never in possession of enough information as to who, where, when and why any change is taking place, and with a natural reaction of panic, they have to make assumptions. It is not the trees or the dolphins or the mountain goats of our world subverting us and making these changes happen, it is human beings. Who exactly they are, where they are, and what their motivations are, are not clear. Why? Because those who make the changes are in charge of the dissemination of information. Without proper information to feed into our wonderful and most useful appendage, the brain, we have no choice but to use our soundest judgments and to speculate as to WHY.
And we panic. Change is scary. Change from without is scarier. Change from without, happening without proper notification and direction is just plain terrifying. That part of our animalistic nature is still there, and well preserved in that it is a wonderful tool for survival.
There is disdain upon the people who are aware of the changes, and who come out to the rest of the populace and express their worries and their opinions, no matter how well-reasoned or worrisome. There is finger-pointing, name calling and fear-mongering about their vigilance and their speculation. The rest believe in the sanctity of their comfort, the power of their ignorance to keep the possibility of change at bay, that they will resort to hostility and backlash to keep that fear away. The ones who are scared of change and who cannot admit the possibility to themselves vastly outnumber the ones who are scared of change but who entertain the notion of its possibility. It may even be said that those who vehemently insist on remaining ignorant oppress and shun those who choose to use their brains, their senses and their imagination to pay attention and foresee the unseen and unknown danger they must inevitably face.
The united States, at its foundation, was the most revolutionary nation of people ever created by humankind, because the oppression, injustice, un-civility and savagery of human nature was still fresh in the minds of its creators. They had had enough of diving rights of any one human being. They had had enough of unequal human being. They had had enough of being told that they could not contribute equally to what was considered law and justice. Despite their own hypocrisy in the maintenance of slavery, the cornerstone was laid for the foundation of a place where eventually every single one of us human beings on this planet could have our say, without fear of the reprisal. They dreamt that it would be catalyst of changes to come elsewhere, bestowing that logic of human mental power, human civility to spread, because it was the right thing to do and to be. We have based our hopes, dreams and trust in those beliefs. We try to hold on to their righteousness today.
That there are people in the U.S. who, today, fear the lack of knowledge, the lack of openness, the lack of clarity and the lack of power from within this Republic, just described, is a testament to the threat that looms before us. The vigilant are crying out for fear of their Constitution. The speculations are running amuck that the changes taking place are the beginning of a reversion of the logic and righteousness that our predecessors fought so hard to achieve. The memory of 200 years ago has not faded among these people. Albeit they do not know exactly what is going on, they cannot be faulted for that lack of knowledge. It is a deliberate lack of knowledge that is feeding that problem. They are not the "Chicken Littles" of our society. Indeed, they are exclaiming their worry because the changes are apparent to them. They are not asking for any harm upon the society we live in. On the contrary, they are asking for the preservation of the equality that we all know and love. The people who shun them and marginalize them must be awakened to their folly. The fear of knowledge is a cop-out. The preoccupation that keeps them ignorant is a dangerous form of laziness that aids their enemies. They cannot see the destruction of the forest for they have chosen to stare at one single tree from one inch away.
The preservation of our essential and fundamental backbone of freedoms and laws is vital to the survival of the dream of world peace, initiated by the founders of the American Democratic Republic. It is, absolutely, under threat. But not from without, where a mystical and zealous enemy is purported to be lurking everywhere, hating our way of life, and itching to take a shot at us every moment of our happy lives. That enemy does exist. But that enemy is virtually powerless to take away the foundations of our existence. We hold on to that foundation with our very existence. We cherish that foundation by our practicing of the democratic process. We reinforce that foundation with vigilance against changes that run counter to what we believe is right and just about our way of governing ourselves and the right way of using our minds and staying civilized human beings.
The true enemy is that which, from within, is undermining our freedoms to know, our right to being informed, and our just demands as human beings to not fear each other.
There is a level of power, past which it is not longer a staple of existence to grow, accumulate and earn more than the next competitor. There are individuals in our world whose legacies have reached that level. They do not wear turbans, or spout out religious frivolities, and threatened the lives of others with bombs and religious edicts. Those people are truly powerless and their moronic and mystical ideologies obviate that point. Those who have reached the level of power where they no longer need to strive to maintain businesses or jobs to maintain themselves or their progeny are at a dearth of meaning in their existence. The obvious next step, then, is to exercise that power. Exercising that power is not about buying things or taking and bestowing lives. That level of power is then all about the control of people, if not control of the world. That sense of power, inevitably, brings with it a personal understanding and a conviction that there must be a reason to that level of power, and hence, a reason, nay a justification, for superiority. It is that reversion to a sense of divine right. They have achieved that power. Therefore they must be better than the rest. And it is a right, or even duty, to control the people of the world.
And so, the speculation about such absolute power brings with it what any of us would do if were in that position. That is, we would try to benefit everyone, because we would want to be good and to do what is right. Decrease pollution. Save the planet. Rid it all of disease. Try to make sure everyone is equal and there is prosperity and happiness. Right?
Well, even if these righteous intentions were really the desire of the utterly powerful, the next step would be to realize that in order to do all of those wonderful things would be to DECREASE the population of human beings on this planet. To save us all, there needs to be less of us. And how does one try to convince a thriving, growing population of human beings, all with the maddening desire to have sex, pass on genes, and leave a legacy of progeny after us, to stop in the name of preserving the planet and the human race? One does not do that. Because it will not work.
So the plan would then be to actually stop the growth covertly and by ceasing the flow of goods that is feeding the ability to have such growth. There would be a decrease in availability of food and a lack of information as to the WHY such shortages were happening. Lack of food, lack of large numbers of progeny. That is how it works in nature. Survival of the fittest would mean those humans best fit to thrive and to procreate would have more progeny and their genes would then pass on.
From the top of the pyramid, where the powerful reside, there is no other option than this. From that vantage, the only way that it could work would be the scheme just stated above. There would need to be absolute control and there would have to be a steadfast belief and resolve to carrying out this ideology to its finality.
However, from someone down here, who has barely two dimes to rub together, I must admit that that option seems a dire road to traverse. From my vantage point, it would signal that there would need to be gendarmeries needed to control the chaos and violence that would break out as these masses would necessarily dwindle and decrease in number, fighting each other for survival. I can foresee the infighting and catastrophic inhumanities that would result. I can foresee the change in the mentality of the humanity that results. It is not right. It is not just. It is an evolution that does NOT NEED to happen.
I am a human being. I am not stupid. I have the ability to think, to imagine, and to foresee possibilities. I say that there is a different path open to us. I say that there is a reasonability to all human beings on the planet, a reasonability that gives them the vitality of judgment and the ability to comprehend the task at hand and to accept the correctness of the reasons for its necessity. My proposal would be to use this wonderful gift that we have, our brain, and to talk it out, as one people. As one human race. For all of the struggles we have endured throughout our history, this dialogue, with all openness and availability of information would be relatively sound and easy. We could discuss the plan. We could strategize the way to go. We would negotiate the hardships to be had as a hardship to be shared by all, as one group, as one understanding and civilized and cohesive group of beings. We can communicate the larger perspective, to explain its logic and let people express their opinions. There would be openness as we have not seen before, but it will be for the betterment of us all.
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